Member postings for Jim Guthrie

I think I remember from my dim and distant past that there was a preference in electrical engineering to use even BA sizes and in mechanical engineering to use odd BA sizes- or it might have been the other way round.

Jim.

I got one a year or two ago, primarily to use for working with small wood sections for model building and it does that very well. I've also used it with small brass and aluminium sections with the sanding discs which came with it and that also worked well. The only complaint I have is that the angular guide and the sliding "T" bar are locked with the one screw. so its not possible to set the guide at a required angle and move it along the table. But there's plenty of meat on the table to make tapped holes for screws to make your own guides, which I have done.

Jim.

For small chamfers I use a ball end mill and just use a little bit of maths or CAD to calculate the offset from the edge to get a good 45 degree representation. The larger the diameter of the ball end, the closer the cut gets from an arc to a straight line.

Jim.

Edited By Jim Guthrie on 14/04/2023 08:42:13

Finger trouble on my part which I had noticed after I had posted but I couldn't get back in to edit. But I thought the mention of Draftsight and AutoCAD LT in context might imply that NanoCAD Free was 2D.

Jim.

For a free 3D CAD you might want to look at NanoCAD

**LINK**

Like Draftsight, this is an AutoCAD LT lookalike and it works pretty well. I've been using it for a year or two since Draftsight withdrew their free version and I haven't had many problems. I was looking at upgrading to one of their paid versions, but they switched to the subscription mode about a year ago.

Jim.

I don't think I would try a larger Jacobs style chuck on the Simat than the one provided. I have a Cowells 90ME which is the present day version of the Flexispeed/Simat family and I doubt if the short 0MT taper arbor could handle any drill appreciably larger than 6mm diameter without slipping.

Cowells supply short 0MT centres if you need them

http://www.cowells.com/pricelist.htm

and they also supply a 6mm capacity Jacobs style chuck complete with the short 0MT arbor so you might be able to get them to supply the arbor separately but I suspect that the Jacobs taper would be too small for a larger chuck.

Jim.

Edited By Jim Guthrie on 20/03/2023 17:15:38

Graham,

I've installed the Solid Edge Community version on my PC and Laptop with no problems, the desktop running Win10 Home and the laptop running Win10 Professional. But the "Pictures" subdirectory on both my machines is not a folder in the root of the C:/ drive but is a sub-directory in the Users folders - i.e. C/Users/Jim/Pictures in my desktop. So presumably the installation software has searched for this sub-directory on both my PCs. I am no expert on the intricacies of the Win 10 setup so I've no idea why your installation is looking for a directory which doesn't exist on either of my machines.

Perhaps a question on the Siemens support forum might get a solution.

Siemens Solid Edge Community Forums

Jim.

I suspect that the preference for Metric or Imperial might depend on what machinery you have. My outside workshop has an Imperial ML10 bought new in the early 1970s and an Imperial Centec 2A Mill which is probably twenty years older than the lathe. Everything in the workshop is Imperial and the only conversion I make in there is fractional to decimal to use the lathe or mill handwheel readings.

My inside workshop is Metric with a relatively new Cowells and a Sieg KX1, so everything done in this workshop is metric with metric measuring tools. So I have to switch from Imperial thinking to Metric thinking and vice versa when I move between the workshops.

I have no real problem with switching between the two. At my school in the 1950s Physics was taught using the cm/gm system and Applied Mechanics using ft/lb.

Jim.

Edited By Jim Guthrie on 03/03/2023 14:40:38

Edited By Jim Guthrie on 03/03/2023 14:41:25

I use smaller carbide slotting cutters in my KX1 CNC mill pretty well exclusively since I cut a lot of non-metallic materials like styrene and HSS is not suitable for this. But I also cut steel, brass and nickel silver. I work in small scales so my usual cutter sizes are from 0.4mm to 2mm and initially I had to do a fair bit of experimentation until I found the best feed and speed to avoid cutter breakage. And they are brittle. I am now in the habit of hooking my little finger round the cutter when loosening the ER25 holder after chipping the ends of cutters when they dropped out of the collet onto the table when changing.

Jim.

My father was organist in a church with a water operated blower for a large three manual Lewis. By the mid-50s the operation of the engine was getting distinctly problematic and was only kept going by the ministrations of the chief engineer from the power house in the local disillery, a colleague of my father. It was supposed to have a start stop remote control by the manuals but that had stopped working and the engine was started just before the service and left running till the end. The whole service was accompanied by the creaking and groaning of the engine. This noise did have one advantage in that it indicated when the engine had stalled, which was frequent and my job as a youngster was to climb up into the organ loft and kick the valve to re-start it, and stand well back as it took off restoring pressure.

It saw its end in the 1950s when there was a long dry spell with restrictions on water use and the church had to make do with a piano. My father persuaded the church to install an electric blower and it appeared not long after.

Jim.

Edited By Jim Guthrie on 11/01/2023 17:20:58

Edited By Jim Guthrie on 11/01/2023 17:21:52

Various health authorities had been predicting another pandemic for several years and I think I remember from discussions at the start of the pandemic that the UK government had carried out an exercise in 2016 to assess the UK's readiness to deal with such a pandemic. This had highlighted problems like shortage of PPE. So our government had a lot of current information of what was required if a pandemic happened. The pandemic could only have been termed unprecedented because the government chose to ignore warnings.

Jim.

I've just downloaded and installed SE CE 2023 on my laptop (Win 10 Pro) and my desktop (Win 10 Home) and both appear to work although I haven't had a chance to push them too far. I tend to use SE on my laptop since it has 32G of RAM whereas the desktop only has 8G.

The UI has changed a bit and I'll have to have a good session with the new setup to see what is on offer. It's not changed too much that I can't stumble my way around it at the moment.

Jim.

On a slightly related topic, I remember seeing a vertical conveyor for sugar in Tate & Lyle's premises in Greenock many years ago in the 1970s. From my now faint memory, it consisted of a spiral trough and this oscillated at a fairly high frequency around its axis and the sugar moved up the trough.

Jim.

The garage which serviced my Vauxhall Omega estate some years ago on one occasion took the dashboard out and checked and cleaned every connection behind it. They had a term for it which I have now forgotten, but they told me they found it necessary to do it fairly regularly to get rid of electrical "funnies".

On a similar vein, way back in the 70s I was driving a BBC Film Unit Hillman estate in the Inverness area when the temperature gauge went hard over into the red and stayed there. My colleague and I checked under the bonnet and there didn't seem to be any obvious signs of overheating. So we contacted base and they told us to take it to a certain garage in Inverness to get the car checked over. When we got there the management decided they were going to deal with it since it was BBC vehicle complete with insignia and they had been contacted from BBC Glasgow. They had the vehicle for an afternoon and we were told that they tried everything and couldn't clear the fault. We decided that we would take the vehicle and drive on very carefully. As we were leaving the garage, the garage electrician, who had been ignored throughout the proceedings, whispered to my colleague to check the earth contact behind the centre of the dashboard. We got a mile or two down the road, dug around behind the dash, found the terminal and gave it a clean, and lo and behold, everything worked properly.

The garage did not charge the BBC but we thought that the electrician should have got something, even if it was only bragging rights over his bosses.

Jim.

Nigel,

Now that IanT has pointed to the tutorial in question, I now remember it when I was digging around for information when I was starting to learn Solid Edge, and I think I remember that I ignored it because it didn't help me much.

I find that Seimens' own tutorial material can be a bit difficult to use, partly because they seem to have their own glossary of terms which is never laid out anywhere, so you tend to stumble along trying to make intelligent guesses as to what is meant. They also read as though they were written by the people who wrote the software.

I found I got more help from non-Seimens sources and you might want to view a tutorial on Youtube written for students.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS3V4aVDMwY&t=10s

There is a series of these tutorials but this one is a good starter to take you round the interface and the basics of using the software. You have got the problem that you will need two screens or two computers if you want to work along with the tutorial. I have used a tablet in the past as a second screen.

Jim.

Edited By Jim Guthrie on 13/09/2022 20:43:22

Edited By Jim Guthrie on 13/09/2022 20:44:55

Have you got a URL for the tutorial in question?

Jim.

Are you sure the tutorial you are using stated to set the software up as "Ordered" as any tutorial information I have found for SE seems to assume that you will be working in "Synchronous"? I actually prefer to work in "Ordered" and I have found it difficult to find useful tutorials for that method so my progress has tended to be trial and error to achieve what I want. This has meant a fair bit of cursing and hair tearing and a fair bit of closing down and starting afresh when I've hit brick walls. But I don't think I've had to go to the length of closing using Task Manager.

Jim.

Way back in the late 1940s I remember going on Sunday School picnics when the liquid refreshment was milk ladelled out of a churn from a local dairy farm. It was probably the easiest way to get a bulk supply of any liquid refreshment. But I still remember enjoying milk straight from the cow.

Jim.

Just a note to say that you should keep your garage above dew point temperature over wintertime or you are liable to get surface condensation leading to rust on your lathe. I found out the hard way forty years ago and the marks on one side of my three jaw chuck are a visible reminder.

My lathe and mill are in my garage workshop and I keep the area above dew point with a thermostatically controlled 1.5kW electric heater set to come on at 50F/10C. I've had no rust problems in thirty years. But with the huge increase in electricity prices, I'm getting covers for the machines and fitting 40W thermostatically controlled heaters on the drip trays to cut down the consumption. On cold winter nights the present garage heater was consuming about the same amount of power as the rest of the house.

Jim.

That brings back memories. I remember doing a bit of phreaking in BBC Broadcasting House in 1960/61. From what I can remember we dialled an unobtainable number - Slough9999 - then flicked the rest such that the exchange selector dropped on to the operator level. There were only one or two extensions on the BBC's internal PABX which would allow this and they were known. Then it was all by interacting with the GPO operators to get routed to who you wanted to call - it was a few years before STD came on the scene. We had lists of all the internal codes to use and I also remember never to say please or thank you or you would be sussed. Calls had to be limited to under three minutes, or six minutes at a push since a PO engineer doing random listening checks and not hearing the three minute pip might suspect dodgy use and do a trace. You pushed your luck going for up to six minutes since if he missed a three minute pip he might hang around to see if he got the next one due.

I think I did it a couple of times just to say that I had done it but things were getting a bit hot at the Broadcasting House since the GPO apparently were well aware that there was a fair bit of this phone use emanating from the building and were on the hunt. The BBC had recruited a fair amount of technical staff from the Post Office so there were a good few people on staff who know the internal workings of the phone network and made good use of it.

I also remember that the Button A/B phone at the BBC Staff Hostel also worked very well.

All remembered from 62 years ago.

Jim.